Self-Betrayal – Superego / Inner Critic

October 30, 2011

How the Superego & Inner Critic Contribute to Self-Betrayal

When the judge (superego, inner critic) tears you away from contact with yourself in the moment, you are unconsciously reliving an original wounding in the soul—the wound of self-betrayal. Many times in your childhood, you were faced with a choice of whether to stay with your own experience—what you were feeling as true and real—or to turn your back on that reality and adopt the one presented to you by parents and family. To reject the latter would have threatened you with rejection, isolation, abandonment, and possibly even death. Inevitably, you chose to accept and operate within the consensus reality of your familial environment, seeing others and yourself the way outside influences mirrored these things.

You began to see yourself as cute if that’s what your parents kept describing you as, or smart, or bad, or slow. Maybe you felt curious but your parents called you nosy; or you felt energetic but you were called restless; or you felt bright but were called too smart for your own britches. Sometimes you may even have felt like a shining star or a warm cloud or a solid rock, but you were always treated as just a small human child. Eventually, you stopped recognizing the truth of your own experience and lived more and more out of your adopted reality. The unavoidable self-betrayal was complete.